


Black Widow: Medusa

by iluvaqt



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Assault, Dubious Consent, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-11 03:51:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4420178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iluvaqt/pseuds/iluvaqt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her life was crafted for her, her path set until Clint Barton showed her another way and gave her a choice. She thought she could leave her past behind. Trouble is, some men aren't mere mortals and not all wounds can heal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Widow: Medusa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was the first time she'd ever experienced love and betrayal.

The second time I met the Winter Soldier, it was five years after he promised to run with me before my graduation. The day they had scheduled my procedure I had lay awake all night, waiting. Waiting for him to show. He was skilled, intelligent, resourceful, I believed he cared about me. I believed him when he said he wouldn't let them steal my future. I didn't want babies right now, I wouldn't know the first thing about them. I'd been trapped in this place since I was a child, what would I know about how to care for one. I was surrounded by pain and death every day, bringing an innocent life into this would be cruel. I was efficient but I didn't believe myself to be cruel. They hadn't made me that...yet. I felt a chill ghost over my body. In my heart, I knew, without a doubt, that I didn't want that option for sometime in the future to be torn away from me.

But he never came. The officers did. I pleaded with my instructor but he wouldn't look at me but I could see on his face the disappointment over my resistance. He didn't like to have to repeat himself in anything. He had explained the necessity of the procedure already. He had wrongfully assumed that I accepted my fate like a good little soldier. Hours later, the anesthesia wearing off and the dull burning across my lower abdomen did little to distract me from the pain in my chest. He never came and I was empty. Stuck there, now a prisoner in body and in spirit. Service and loyalty to Soviet Supremacy was all I had left.

We had been assigned together for a mission. Posing as a young married couple. I had never been sent out on a mission longer than a few days. Months of pretending, being young and inexperienced with affection, even feigned affection, I fell in love with him. And however naive of me, I believed he'd fallen in love with me too. So when I confessed to him, late one night as he held me, that I was afraid. That I couldn't go through with the procedure, he had grown quiet and held me within the safe strength of his arms and whispered vehemently, that he would always protect me. We would be a team always, and that we would escape. We would finish the mission and escape.

The mission complete, our handlers returned me to the Academy and that was the last time I saw him. Wiser from years of playing spy and being in the world I realize now that perhaps it had been a test for both of us. They may have been watching, listening and evaluating the whole time. Perhaps he was punished for his traitorous words, just as I was once I had healed from the hysterectomy. I spent a three weeks in Psy-Ops for indoctrination and electro-therapy. A jaded part of my soul whispered that perhaps it had only been a test for me, and his affection, his words, every act of tenderness and intimacy had been nothing but masterfully executed lies. If that's all it had been, he was a far better liar than I, even now.

Five years on, only two years free of HYDRA control, I was completely unprepared for him to re-enter my life. Subconsciously, I had to have suspected this day would come, but consciously, in order to guard against any emotional vulnerability, I had buried our time together behind impenetrable walls in my mind. Or at least I had believed them to be thick and impenetrable. One look at his profile approaching through the frosted glass, my heart recognized his walk and my mind shut down. My hand froze on the dial of the safe and for a moment, I couldn't think. I always had escape plans, contingencies. I always completed my mission, even if it meant getting messy or improvising.

I had passed the lobby security earlier dressed as utilities maintenance, and then shed the outer layer after exciting the elevator in a camera blind spot, to a executive suit and glasses, and stuffed the uniform into my leather satchel. From my check of the hijacked camera feed before entering the building, I knew Fisk was out for the evening and his secretary slash right-hand-woman slash muscle was on the top floor, blowing off steam with his other hired grunts.  Preoccupied with cracking the bio-metrics on the safe and waiting for the 32-bit encrypted password to crack under the Stark Tech ghost algorithm drive, I didn't notice his approach until he was hand was on the door. 

Making a snap decision, I scanned the room quickly, and spotted a storage closet. If I didn't want to start the process over, I had to leave the drive running. I closed the portrait over the safe and made a dash for the closet, just as the automatic doors arched opened and my one-time, fake-husband, looking like had hadn't aged a day, with perfectly coiffed hair and a confident stride, walked in like he owned the place, carrying an armload of Koures lilies. 

I froze where I stood, no more than a step away from my intended safe haven. His keen eyes pursed me from head to toe and my heart stopped beating the entire moment it took for him to do so. His posture stiffened and his gloved hands tightened. When his eyes met mine, they were guarded with a hint of confusion.

My heart started up again and began pounding erratically in my chest, my fingers itched for a weapon, any weapon. The knife strapped to my upper thigh felt cold and heavy, but I remembered who fast he was. If he perceived me as the threat, I would be dead before my hand could even get under my skirt.

I blinked and did my best to look demure yet confident in my right to be exactly where I was. “Hi,” I said cautiously. "I wasn't aware Mr. Fisk was a lilies kind of guy. Always thought he favored red roses."

He looked down at the bouquet he was holding and a grin broke over his lips. My heart sputtered in my chest, he had such a beautiful smile. It made him look so much younger and launched his aesthetic appeal into the stratosphere. A sure plea for mercy for all ovaries everywhere. He might look youthful but never innocent. Even before we worked together, I knew he hadn't known innocence for many years. Yet, how could he stand there now, and look unchanged. He had been much older than me when we worked together, and that was five years ago. I'd changed. My hair was straightened, and a lot longer than the shoulder length waves it had been in my Academy days. I knew I had a semi-permanent furrow between my eyebrows from too much frowning, and fine worry lines on my forehead, that came from caring about the people in my life. It was a novel thought, people to care about. For much of my youth I'd been conditioned to believe that there was only assets and liabilities, allies and enemies, the mission and threats to the mission. Just checks and balances, no human connections, emotions or distractions. That was a different life. That Black Widow wasn't me anymore. 

He inclined his head slightly, putting the flowers on the desk. He reached with one of his gloved hands for me and I didn't move a muscle, I didn't even blink, watching his every move with hawk-like precision. "I know you," he said, his eyes wrinkling at the corners while he studied my face. 

Behind him, in the mirror-like frosted glass, I could see a small green light blinking. The drive. It was done. I wondered in a panicked thought if he'd noticed it too. I side-stepped slowly to block his line of sight. "I don't think so," I said as I decided to lie. _Distract him, get him to leave, get the job done and get out. Run, lock it all up, assess these splitting old wounds later._ He was going to compromise the mission, if it wasn't dead in the water already.

"You did something you your hair." There was a touch of disapproval in his voice. 

His whispered words of desire and need as he filled me with his heat and covered me with his body, echoed in my ears and the feel of his fingers carding through my hair, cradling my head as he plundered my mouth made my insides twitch in memory. How could he remember his hands in my soft curls as we made love but not remember his broken promise? I felt my eyes burning to match the stabbing pain of his betrayal in my chest.

"You are not the redhead I was expecting to see." There is no warmth in his eyes, no remorse or pain to match the invisible fingers clawing at my heart, threatening to break the carefully erected exterior that was my professional mask.

"I imagine not," I answered coldly. My gaze slid to my satchel that I had left under the desk, and the open safe-kit on the floor.  

His face grew cold and he grabbed the bag from the floor, thrusting it in my direction. "Leave Talia, before they make you." 

And all sense of lingering doubts over his culpability in their deception exploded through my psyche, along with any fantasies I still clung to of reuniting with him someday. I put the bag over my shoulder, threw open the portrait and extracted the drive. I also opened the safe and took out the stolen prototype drug from Oscorp Labs, that S.H.I.E.L.D had a vested interest in seeing removed from civilian control.

I felt him at my back before I even closed the vault. "I can't let you take that."

"Since when were you into espionage? I thought it was only contract killing. Or maybe I was your first and they saw how good you were and expanded your mission scope."

"Give me the prototype," he demanded. 

His gaze slid down from the deep V in my green silk shirt to my the flare of my hips in the pencil skirt I was wearing. His lips pulled up at the edges, as his eyes tracked down the smooth expanse of creamy legs exposed by the front slit in the skirt to her peep-toe heels, revealing her crimson finish manicure. "Not effective footwear for making a silent or quick getaway." Unless of course her plan was seductive distraction. In his case, it was certainly working to her favor. The longer he spent in her presence, especially close proximity to her, her scent, the feel of her hair on his skin, the memories were resurfacing think and fast. Granted they were disordered and flashes but he remembered something powerful about being around her. Everything was intense, heightened and even though his training was screaming that she was dangerous, that he needed to retrieve the drug and make his escape, he couldn't let her go.

Involuntarily, my eyes closed when his breath touched my skin. He still smelled of gunpower and leather oil and a heady scent that was signature to him. The man oozed sex appeal and that was without his natural charm coming into play. I was a moth to the flame and when his hand closed over my upper arm, it was only self-preservation that had me moving.

I drove my elbow into his stomach and smashed my fist into his groin and ran, kicking off my shoes as I went. I exited the office and ran for the fire escape. Exiting on the floor below, I entered the terrace area and clamped by grapple line on the rail and tested it before throwing myself over. Several feet above street level, I released the line and dropped to the pavement before I hailed a cab. After I got in, I took my sneakers out of the bag and put them on my bare feet. I spared a second thought for my lost pumps, but quickly dismissed the slight pang of regret. It was why I never wore fashion labels while undercover, unless it was to sell my cover. S.H.I.E.L.D Accounts Department tended to kick up a stink over certain expense claims. Still it was time consuming and frustrating looking for comfortable stylish shoes. It was almost an oxymoron. It was like searching the figurative needle in a haystack, style and comfort rarely co-existed. And those leather pumps had been it. At least I had that label committed to memory, even if that particular style was out of stock, the brand were worth revisiting.

Back in D.C., the prototype delivered to our scientists, my debrief with Coulson done (left out the part where I knew the man who'd almost interrupted my retrieval, that will probably come back to bite me in the ass someday, but I didn't have the energy or mental fortification endure reliving my past with my ex-lover, fake husband. On they way out of the office, I stopped to make a secure call to Barton to let him know I had survived another solo op, he never said but I know he worries and then I was headed home. Looking forward to a long bath, and a good red wine, with the hope that I would survive the dreams I knew would plague my thoughts for the following days, if not weeks, because I'd seen _him_ again.


End file.
